🚀 go-pugleaf

I don't normally Cc people, but given low traffic in this newsgroup...

Mike Holloway <holloway@concentric.net> wrote:
>"Adam H. Kerman" wrote:

>>No articles have appeared in bit.listserv.railroad in months. The gateway
>>between it and the RAILROAD list has been down for months.

>>I have been unable to contact the bit.* hierarchy administrator. The address
>>in the default control.ctl in the INN distribution lists jim@american.edu,
>>an address that no longer functions.

>>Who currently administers this hierarchy?

>Fortuitous that I happened to look in here wondering if AU has posted anything
>in here in the last year.  It would seem not.

I was curious: Was this specifc group actually gated from a mailing list, or
was it news only?

>The American University mail to news gateway has been down for nearly two
>years now.

I didn't realize it had been so long; I though it was only since May 1. I know
I've seen some things gated earlier this year, but that may have been through
something else.

>Newsguy.com (mike@newsguy.com) has very generously volunteered to take it
>over.  However, they do not been given admin authority over the bit hierarchy,
>as had been promised over a year ago by AU.  I've been trying to make some
>contact with someone at AU, but no e-mail has been answered.

As have I. Someone gave me a contact to try after I posted to
news.admin.hierarchies, but no reply. That quoted a reply of Peter M. O'Donnell
<pmod@american.edu> who said he was administering the hierarchy after
Jim McIntosh left AU with Jim's old address, jim@american.edu. My mail to
Peter has been unanswered. Last December, Peter said the gateway would be
eliminated when AU took down the mainframe on May 1, 1999. He also said that
newsguy was gating some, but not all the groups.

I have no idead what happened. Perhaps Peter left AU as well?

Do we know that newsguy is still willing, or have we lost the window?

>Are you the listowner for RAILROAD?

No; just a former lurker who used to read it on bit.listserv.railroad. That
was a second problem: It's moderated, and all messages from nonsubscribers
are trashed. This forced those who wanted to read it from News to subscribe
with a no-mail option, a pain. I think this policy is a problem, but that's
secondary till the gateway is re-established.

>Do you know of any other lists still gating to a bit group?

I don't; things rarely propogate to my server, if they exist. There used to
be a list of gated newsgroups from mailing lists that predated Usenet in
all hierarchies. Didn't tale used to maintain that? It's been a long while
since I saw that.

>Perhaps we need to organize.  AU has always been very generous in the past,
>but it seems that they won't respond unless they receive a large number of
>polite requests.

Aside from the pgp key, what do they have that is needed? If I had a list of
the list owners, I'd be willing to contact them and ask them to conatact
AU. We should probably set up a list, gated-l.

Actually, one probably used to exist and was gated to something here.